States of Change Chapter 35: Almost Heaven (West Virginia)

States of Change is an ongoing work of serial fiction.

The speculative story-line seeks to inspire thought on ethics, culture and our planet's future.

The year is 2076, decades after Oosa's defederalization. 

Fifty independent States have forged unique societies from 

revolutionary technology and ideology

Well, here's the twist right in the beginning, out-of-staters. WestVir's Heaven is a dream within a dream, prospectively within yet another dream. So what?

Of course, the core dreamscape I'm splaying your way is our State's supremely firewalled metaverse, Realscape. The digital ancients might see our virtual world as a souped-up version of Tron, The Matrix or Ready Player One. But for WestVirulites Realscape is everyday life. How did a rural, coal mining state end up top in the metaclass? Historians disagree, but perhaps in some zeitgeist subconscious fashion, our libertarian culture anticipated defederalization years before the Inflection Point. Spearheading on-line sandbox communities brought boom times to the Mountaineer State allowing us to climb the technologic Jacob's Ladder toward hillbilly Nirvana. Indeed, some metaverse sages, drawn by their AI horse teams, actually tout WestVir's secession to the Realscape int parallel decision to join the North in the Oosa Civil War two centuries ago.

Agreed, too much data download to underscore my personal dream sequence in Realscape. You see, I'm living an architectural astronaut's life, one that will probably never occur IRL. The training was intense, the intermediate missions quite hardcore, and though my design team consists of sidewalk AIs, underage Minecrafters and structural engineers willing to endure post-modern flourishes, we still are a tight niche support team. The construction and support of the Saturn tourism infrastructure takes a couple e-villages, but the physics and meta-economics of the project are solid. Thousands of WestVirulites traverse above, below and through Saturn's atmosphere and ring system daily. All experiences are exquisitely rendered for high-end sensory enjoyment. Nothing beats seeing satisfied faces of my peers grokking existence with such ardor. Dream or not it's an exciting life, Heaven one might say!

Oh, what's that you ask? No I'm not forgetting the bottom layer of the Realscape dream, even if most of disregard the Muskian hypotheses of simulations all the way down. We WestVirulites are a pragmatic bunch. Still we occasionally enjoy a bit of irony. If the IRL has its meat-bots, perhaps the meat-verse has its daemons too. In general, we're too busy living our best lives expanding the Realscape to waste to too many cycles on such speculation.